Wilhelmina Barns-Graham CBE (8 June 1912 – 26 January 2004) was one of the foremost British abstract artists, a member of the influential Penwith Society of Arts.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, known as Willie, was born in St Andrews, Fife, on 8 June 1912, daughter of Allan Barns-Graham, head of a Scottish landed gentry family- he owned estates named Lymekilns and Cambuslang in Lanarkshire, Kirkhill in Ayrshire, Fereneze in Renfrewshire, and Carbeth Guthrie in Stirlingshire, Scotland- and his wife Wilhelmina Menzies, daughter of Charles Bayne Meldrum, whose family of minor Scottish gentry owned the estates of Dura and Balmungo, Fifeshire.

[6] Since birth Barns-Graham suffered from weakness of the lungs, exacerbated by stress or anxiety, and in 1933 she contracted pleurisy forcing her to take a break from College.

During 1940 and 1941 Barns-Graham contributed to the war effort by volunteering in a factory making camouflage nets however using the rough materials gave her dermatitis so she had to give up the work, instead knitting string vests and socks.

[12] And in the third, in July/ August 1948, with (alongside Berlin, Wells, and Lanyon) Bryan Wynter, Kit Barker, David Haughton, Patrick Heron, and Adrian Ryan.

[14] This was a pivotal moment in her artistic career, inspiring Barns-Graham to embark on a series of glacier paintings that she would revisit for decades to come.

[2] From 1960, on inheriting a house outside St Andrews from her aunt Mary Niesh (who had been a support to her throughout her art college years), she split her time between summers in Cornwall and winters in Scotland.

[21] Through the course of her life Wilhelmina Barns-Graham's work generally lay on the divide between abstract and representational, typically drawing on inspirations from landscape.

The influence of St Ives then began to take hold as local shapes and colours became apparent - the Cornish rocks, landscape and buildings.

[9] Perhaps the most significant innovation at this time derived from the ideas of Naum Gabo, who was interested in the principle of stereometry - defining forms in terms of space rather than mass.

In the early 1960s, reflecting the turmoil in her personal life, Barns-Graham adopted a severe geometrical form of abstraction as a way of taking a fresh approach to her painting.

This is seen in a series of ice paintings in the late 1970s and then in a body of work that explores the hidden energies of sea and wind, composed of multiple wave-like lines drawn in the manner of Paul Klee.

The Expanding Form paintings of 1980 are the culmination of many ideas from the previous fifteen years - the poetic movement in these works revealing a more relaxed view.

Working mainly on paper (there are relatively few canvases from this period) the images evolved to become, initially, highly complex, rich in colour and energy, and then, simultaneously, bolder and simpler, reflecting her enjoyment of life and living.

(Barns-Graham, October 2001) This outlook is perfectly expressed in the extraordinary collection of screen prints that she made with the Graal Press of Edinburgh, between 1999 and 2003.